20 de janeiro de 2013

Virtual kiosks are no longer theoretical. According to a report inL’Atelier, EBay recently created a couple over the recent holidays dedicated to a variety of products and services. “The online auction and sales platform provider recently opened pop-up stores in London and Berlin, where customers were able to make purchases using smartphones and also obtain advice and training on how to sell on eBay.” Though the stock in trade was hard goods, there’s no reason why the concept cannot be applied to e-books. Bookstores are (unfortunately) already being used as showrooms for book browsers, so this just legitimizes the process.

“It's not a replacement for the (city) library system, it's an enhancement,” says Wolff who also happens to be a book collector.The library hopes to secure at least $250,000 to acquire the first 10,000 titles. There will also be 100 e-readers available for checkout.“We wanted to find a low-cost, effective way to bring reading and learning to the county and also focus on the change in the world of technology...It will help people learn,” said Wolff.

De Arbeiderspers/A W Bruna, the largest publisher in the Netherlands, has removed DRM from its e-books for the first time.All of the publisher's e-books, aside from those sold via the iBooks store, will be sold with a watermark attached rather than any DRM system.

In late 2012, we wrapped up a study of the e-reading consumer. Based on a survey of over 1200 e-reading households, we looked at reading habits (both physical and paper books), what devices they used, how many devices they owned (and how long they had them) and much more.

"Kindles have about 90 per cent of the market, which means Amazon virtually controls it. Only in the last two months have indies been able to sell a reader, mainly Kobos. Through the Booksellers Association, who have organised and orchestrated it, we get a kickback from every ebook sale from a Kobo reader that we sell."Smaller booksellers still have concerns about the rise of the ebook. Mr Johns cites the recent appearance of Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child at just 20p: "That was a shake. If an ebook is that cheap it doesn't generate enough income for anyone. If that sort of thing becomes the norm the economics of producing a book becomes shaky and it doesn't help anyone because the trade will collapse."

Penguin has just announced that they are joining On Demand Books’ growing Espresso Book Machine (EBM) program and will soon offer some of the titles they publish as POD books. The details on this deal are still sketchy, but it looks like On Demands Books scored quite the coup today.On Demand Books has been distributing their POD machine since 2007 but they have not been able to offer much in the way of popular titles. The last time I checked the only major publisher to support the EBM was HarperCollins, and they only release some of their backlist to the platform. The rest of the content came from Google Books (largely PD titles) and Lightning Source, Ingram’s own digital (ebooks, POD, etc) distribution service.

In another example, Smith cited an anonymous publisher that selectively windowed its ebook and print book titles to see if releasing the digital version after the print version would result in increased sales for the print version. Sales of print copies increased by 0.4% — but ebook sales decreased by 52% and overall sales dropped by 22%, presumably because of piracy.Anti-piracy efforts also reduce incidences of piracy. Smith studied the effects of anti-piracy laws in France and of the take-down of piracy site Megaupload. In the case of the anti-piracy laws in France, conversation about the laws and then their implementation helped boost digital content sales by anywhere between 5% and 30%, depending on the content. And the shutdown of Megaupload coincided with reduced instances of piracy across multiple countries.

Pricing, the intersection of rights and metadata, and publicity are the three primary obstacles to global sales, according to Kobo’s director of content management Ashleigh Gardner and her colleague Nathan Maharaj, the company’s director of merchandising.

Forty-five percent of those surveyed said standalone e-readers are "irrelevant." But they're not down on digital: 60% cited tablets -- such as the iPad or Kindle Fire -- as the ideal e-reading device.This year, 85% of those surveyed are optimistic about the role of e-books. But when it comes to specifics, there seems to be some anxiety. Just "64% believe that publishers are 'capable of competing' in the new digital marketplace," Publishers Weekly reports, and "55% are confident that their own companies can compete." McQuivey noted that both those figures are down about 10% from last year.

New York Times E-Book Best Sellers

A version of this list appears in the January 27, 2013 issue of The New York Times Book Review. Rankings reflect sales for the week ending January 12, 2013.